Pete Seeger on hope

Everywhere I go I tell this: When I meet someone who says “There’s really no hope, you know, things are going to go from worse to worse, and this is the last century of the human race.”I tell them, “Did you expect to see our great Watergate President to leave office the way he did?”And they say “No, I guess I didn’t.”I say “Did you expect the Pentagon to have to leave Vietnam the way it did?”

“No I didn’t.”

I say “Did you expect to see the Berlin Wall come down so peacefully the way it did?”

They say “No, I really didn’t expect that.”

Then I say “Did you expect to see Mandela the head of South Africa?”

“No I really didn’t expect that I thought he’d rot in jail the rest of his life.”

“Well,” I say, “if you couldn’t predict those things don’t be confident you can predict there’s no hope.”